Revolution won't necessarily launch in Japan first, according to Nintendo Europe's senior vice president of marketing Jim Merrick, who also has some strong words for Epic Game's Mark Rein, who recently criticised the platform holder's next-generation plans.

Speaking in an interview with our sister site Eurogamer today, Merrick said Revolution might "not follow the stereotypical formula of Japan first, then the US, then Europe some time later". "Anything's possible," he said, when asked if the console could conceivably launch in Europe first.

Reacting to Mark Rein's recent suggestion that games using the Revolution's freestyle controller would be "gimmicky" and "cheap", Merrick paid tribute to Epic's strengths, but added, "he doesn't have a Revolution controller, he doesn't have a dev kit, he's talking about something he knows nothing about," before issuing something of a challenge - "if he'd like to get a dev kit and really dig into it, then I'd be interested to hear what he has to say."

Merrick also answered questions about pricing possibilities for the Revolution's back catalogue downloads, talked about other download possibilities, and confirmed that the console's 512MB of Flash memory will be expandable.

The Nintendo executive also reaffirmed, "I would be very disappointed if I went to E3 and didn't play Revolution games," and said that Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima was among developers working on the system.

Nintendo's Revolution is expected to launch in 2006. You can read the entire Jim Merrick interview on Eurogamer." [link]